by smaslennikov on 2/23/21, 3:05 PM with 398 comments
by awillen on 2/23/21, 3:38 PM
The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.
Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.
by BitwiseFool on 2/23/21, 3:47 PM
Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition matters when sifting through resumes. We get hundreds of applications and it's a fact that candidates from well known schools are selected to advance more often than candidates from obscure schools. School prestige and name recognition acts as a proxy assessment of the candidate. HR just doesn't look into how good the Computer Science program is at "Keene State College". But they do know that if someone went to Princeston or Stanford they must be pretty smart. To be clear, a degree from an obscure university does not disqualify someone, but it does put them at a disadvantage when the applicant pool is large.
by fossuser on 2/23/21, 3:33 PM
If you’re trying to buy education the others are overpriced.
by lumost on 2/23/21, 3:31 PM
by Animats on 2/23/21, 6:18 PM
by Taylor_OD on 2/23/21, 4:08 PM
A Carnegie Mellon degree may help you get more interviews and therefore land your first job if you are struggling otherwise but its likely the person with the Kent State CS degree and the Illinois Urbana Champaign CE degree are not applying for the same jobs right out of school.
After the first few years education becomes less important and actual skills become far more important. Again this is more true at non FANG/SV/Start up type companies. Which is where most engineers will work for the majority of their career.
by solosoyokaze on 2/23/21, 3:55 PM
I'm not saying don't go to school if that's what you want to do, but you can easily get a much better return on your investment if you "buy" some time to work on OSS. That being said, it's a lot harder to do if you have no money since you can't get a government loan to cover your expenses. UBI would be very helpful here.
by akeck on 2/23/21, 3:45 PM
by gnicholas on 2/23/21, 9:55 PM
Pre-pandemic, going to college away from home offered a fun environment with many amenities. During the pandemic, these fun aspects are greatly limited (and parents might not let kids go anyway, due to health risks). When you take away so much of the fun stuff that goes along with college, it doesn't make as much sense to pay $50k/yr in tuition when the experience isn't that much different than your local state school (which costs $10k).
Top colleges, on the other hand, still offer differentiation in terms of degree prestige. Add onto that the promise of not taking standardized tests into account (as the article notes Cornell and other schools are doing this), and it's not surprising that applications are up.
by musicale on 2/23/21, 9:53 PM
Landing a faculty job at any university - public or private - is an extraordinary achievement.
by kbos87 on 2/23/21, 9:41 PM
If I were applying to universities today and had otherwise good credentials but difficulties performing on standardized tests like the SATs, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of remorse for trying to cheat in a rigged system.
by stolenmerch on 2/23/21, 3:51 PM
Scott Galloway made a prediction last summer of what colleges and universities will thrive, survive, struggle, or face challenges given the current situation. Basically, the higher ed market will consolidate around more elite schools.
by fiftyfifty on 2/24/21, 3:38 AM
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/16/787909495/fewer-students-are-...
by barrenko on 2/23/21, 3:45 PM
by dvdhnt on 2/23/21, 10:51 PM
Right or wrong, "top" colleges are considered better equipped to get you close to the wealth and power needed to live comfortably.
This isn't much different from travelers going west and buying claims in search of gold.
Almost the entire collegiate system in the US is fundamentally broken. It is siloed and just as much pay-to-play as the rest of this country. The soaring costs, low returns, and behemoth mis-allocation of resources towards college football are examples of this.
by swiley on 2/23/21, 3:39 PM
by endisneigh on 2/23/21, 3:51 PM
1) poor people probably wouldn't be able to attend
2) it would be substantially more expensive
3) the acceptance rate would be much higher
ideally this would result in schools like UMass Amherst (which ironically is the best public university in Massachusetts - weird considering other states have better state flagships, but that's another issue) being able to compete far more effectively.
why would a smart poor kid ever go to UMass when you could go to Harvard for free? it has never made sense that you get better financial return from say, MIT, even though it costs the same as RandomPrivateU.
by sputknick on 2/23/21, 8:57 PM
by twoslide on 2/23/21, 3:50 PM
by boatsie on 2/23/21, 8:17 PM
by peter303 on 2/23/21, 7:43 PM
In addition to low births, student immigration has been severely restricted in recent years by federal policy.
With both factors, the applicant pool is smaller.
by seibelj on 2/23/21, 3:40 PM
Framing this as “rich” vs. “poor” is ridiculous. These “poor” institutions were charging 6 figure sums for a piece of paper. There is nothing beneficial to society by having a lot of unwanted institutions who charge insane amounts that no one wants to go to voluntarily anymore. High Ed needed a shakeout and I’m happy it’s finally happening.
by neonate on 2/23/21, 6:09 PM
by verst on 2/23/21, 8:37 PM
The entire post secondary education system in Germany is focused on specialization in a given field of study (at universities) or vocational training. The advantage here is that there is no financial penalty for choosing the wrong path, only missed opportunity cost due to time spent.
I completed my secondary school in Germany at a typical Gymnasium (the highest tier of the three major secondary school types). Note that my parents did not attend college and aren't wealthy. Around 8th grade my school curriculum exceeded their knowledge. I attended a private liberal arts college in the US as an international student where I relied on (private) scholarships and (private) loans [international students cannot get subsidized loans -- generally interest rates are high and interest accumulates even while enrolled in school].
The only reason why I chose to attend university was because I wanted to gain an advanced understanding of mathematics and I aspired to one day become a college professor (this has since changed of course).
Despite my school being very highly ranked and my hard work producing good academic results it simply did not have the brand reputation to unlock opportunities such as even being invited to phone screens. I had to take a roundabout way to get into my career and instead work my way up from less desirable positions. This focus on brand for academic institution is also something you do not generally find in Germany where the criteria is typically the binary question of whether or not you have a particular degree in a particular subject area (though again the vast majority of jobs do not require a degree).
Too often I observed the candidate with a Bachelor's at ~3.0 GPA from say Stanford being preferred over the candidate with a ~4.0 from a lesser known but equally rigorous institution.
Of course this focus on brand continued beyond college. I quickly learned that a less desirable / impactful role at a top company opens more doors than top positions at unknown companies.
Call me pessimistic, but I do not advise people to attend college in the US unless they can attend schools with a very strong brand and extensive alumni network in their desired professional field.
Looking back at my education my secondary education in Germany was more formative and critical than my college education in the US. While I did have the opportunity to take advanced coursework in college here in the US it did not prepare me for generic jobs not specific to my field of study (and barely even is an asset in my profession). I believe we need to improve high school education in this country and reverse the trend of requiring a college education for the majority of jobs.
by xenihn on 2/23/21, 11:29 PM
The other three metrics (essay, grades, letters of recommendation) can be gamed/cheated. I'm sure standardized testing cheating happens, but it's so much more difficult, even for someone with connections.
Your grades are positively affected if your family can afford tutors for you, or if your parents are educated enough to tutor you themselves. You can have inflated grades that aren't reflective of your actual competency or knowledge. The inverse of this is also true. Bad grades don't provide any obvious information or signal on their own. Poorer students may be assigned to schools that don't have AP classes, so they don't even have the possibility of grade inflation.
You can have people help you write your admissions essay. Hell, you can have other people write it for you altogether. All of the wealth factors that influence GPA also influence your essay, if you actually write it completely by yourself.
Letters of recommendation seem to be the most exclusionary and biased of all. I actually think it's ridiculous that they're still allowed. There is no way to verify that they are true. They're grounded in connections and elitism. How is the average applicant even supposed to compete with letters from a politician, alumni, famous businessperson, or some other type of celebrity? A wealthy student's family can also pay for these in multiple ways, if, for some reason, the connections didn't already exist.
Meanwhile, the argument for tests being biased is that wealthier kids are able to prepare for them more than kids with less resources. But all of the other metrics tie to wealth as well, and every argument against standardized tests also applies to GPA. I'd even say GPA is influenced by wealth more than tests.
You can pirate expensive prep materials. You can PROBABLY find a volunteer tutor if you live in or near a college. But even taking the argument that wealthier children are at an advantage at full value, that advantage is still less than what is provided by the other 3 metrics.
I'm taking this a bit personally since I had an incredibly bad GPA in junior high and high school. I hated doing homework, and I hated sitting in lectures. I failed multiple classes because homework and attendance counted for so much of the total grade, that even 100%ing every quiz and test would still give me less than 60% in the class. The only thing that proved that I wasn't mentally retarded was my performance in course tests and standardized tests.
College went ok. I'm now doing better career-wise and financially than anyone I went to school with, including all of the IB kids who went to top-tier schools (with one exception, there's ONE other person on my level, because they went into finance and they're now an iBanker). I would have been completely screwed without standardized tests as a metric.
by DC1350 on 2/23/21, 4:53 PM